My weekly roundup of the best of Vermont journalism will again be posted late, most likely Wednesday. The delay in posting is because of the Legislature holding its final vote on H.454, the education reform bill, on Monday. Had to leave the decks cleared for that. And before I can get to the best of Vermont journalism, I have to begin with a massive media fail that reflects our sadly depleted news ecosystem.

Last week, a House-Senate conference committee was meeting to try to hash out a compromise education reform bill. The six conferees (three Senate, three House) met multiple times. Every meeting was warned in advance and was open to the public. And we got virtually no coverage at all of their highly impactful deliberations.

Now, I know legislative hearings can be a big fat drag. You can spend hours on an uncomfortable chair, sharing a tiny room with too many people, and wind up with nothing at all to report.

But this wasn’t your average legislative hearing, not at all.

This was the final showdown between House and Senate on the most consequential issue of the session. It was also the only meaningful business being conducted last week. And each meeting was virtually guaranteed to produce a solid story. There was a lot of drama. Senate conferees repeatedly floated new proposals that the House side didn’t like. The process came close to breaking down. There was drama aplenty, and the stakes couldn’t have been higher.

There could have been, and should have been, daily updates. What did we get instead?

On Thursday, Vermont Public’s Peter Hirschfeld filed an excellent piece about rank-and-file “misgivings” among Democrats and Republicans. It was fine as far as it went, but it didn’t capture the divisions on the conference committee. Hirschfeld’s final paragraph quoted Sen. Randy Brock as referring to “bickering” on the committee, which is hardly the right word for it. I don’t fault Hirschfeld; his story wasn’t about the conference committee.

That was all we got from Vermont Public until the conferees finally agreed on a deal Friday. From Seven Days, we didn’t get anything until the deal was sealed. VTDigger was even worse. On Thursday, there was a solid story about the Commission on the Future of Public Education being sidelined by Gov. Phil Scott and legislative leadership. But nothing on the conference committee until its deliberations were over.

Here’s the thing. Vermont Public and Seven Days don’t have the resources to commit to blow-by-blow Statehouse coverage — although they might have seen fit to make an exception last week. But VTDigger? It’s the only media outlet with multiple reporters covering state policy and politics. It’s the only outlet that promises thorough Statehouse coverage.

Which is a sad story in itself. We’re not far removed from the days when five media outlets would have been elbowing each other for prime position on this story: VTDigger, Seven Days, Vermont Public, the Times Argus/Rutland Herald, and the Burlington Free Press*. Plus, two of the three major TV stations had experienced reporters on the beat: Kyle Midura and later Neal Goswami for WCAX and Stewart Ledbetter for WPTZ.

*Back when I first started writing about #vtpoli, the Free Press had three reporters on the politics/poliicy beat. The Times Argus and Herald had a Capitol bureau with three reporters. Seven Days had two full-time reporters covering the Legislature plus its political columnist. Good times, right, grandpappy?

Those days are long gone, and they aren’t coming back. Digger carries a heavy load here. But if they don’t carry the load, then nobody does. And for my money, you can’t understand the outcome of the education reform debate unless you know what went on in the conference committee last week.

Remember the Washington Post’s tagline from the years before Jeff Bezos’ balls (and principles, if he had any) shriveled into dust? “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

Well, last week, the public’s understanding of the education reform debate died in darkness. Makes you wonder how many other stories we never get to find out about. I suspect it’s quite a few.